This is the first comprehensive study of the group of avant-garde Soviet writers who styled themselves OBERIU, 'The Association for Real Art'. Graham Roberts re-examines commonly-held assumptions about OBERIU, its identity as a group, its aesthetics, its relationship to the formalists and the Bakhtin circle, and its place within Russian and European literary traditions. Roberts concludes by showing how the self-conscious literature of OBERIU SH its metafiction SH occupies an important transitional space between modernism and postmodernism.